Antonin 'Nino' Scalia The Great, And The War To Come

A robed Justice Antonin Scalia sits for a formal photograph at the Supreme Court building. Scalia, who died Saturday of natural causes, was hailed as one of the great jurists in Supreme Court history. But his death has already set off a furious debate over a replacement. (AP)

The Law: Antonin Scalia was one of the greatest jurists in history because he used his formidable intellect to insist that law is law, not license for activism. It will be total war replacing him.

Justice Scalia, who died Saturday, for decades had been a leading hate figure for those seeking to transform American society. That’s because the left had found that the courts were a means of enacting its agenda whenever the voters refused to cooperate.

For anyone who values rule by the people, politicized courts should be a chilling thought. Yet it’s been accepted and promoted by the Democratic Party for many decades now.

Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the U.S. Supreme Court went well beyond its proper function, about which Alexander Hamilton assured the nation that “the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous” branch of government under the Constitution’s separation of powers.

The California governor, appointed by Dwight Eisenhower, who would later call the appointment “the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made,” had been above all else a politician.

As chief justice for 16 years in the '50s and '60s, Warren viewed the Constitution as a political tool for solving big national problems that elected officials couldn’t, and the high court as the elitist institution that would use this method to save Americans from themselves, whether the issue was desegregation or abortion.

To all this fashionable judicial activism, Scalia replied that the Supreme Court should mind its own business and get out of politics. Scalia was humble enough to know he was a judge, that no one had ever voted for him to be dog catcher, let alone to resolver of national dilemmas.

The Constitution, and any other laws he was asked to examine were, in his view, exactly what they said. In this, Scalia was a consummate man of the people. In the long-overdue 2008 Heller decision, the first in American history to address the plain words of the Second Amendment and affirm that they did indeed provide a right to keep and bear arms, Scalia wrote:

“The First Amendment contains the freedom-of-speech guarantee that the people ratified, which included exceptions for obscenity, libel, and disclosure of state secrets, but not for the expression of extremely unpopular and wrong-headed views. The Second Amendment is no different.”

What the people ratify is the law, not what jurists believe is better for them.

Historically, lame-duck presidents are not allowed to make Supreme Court appointments, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell instantly made it plain that the next president, not this one, gets to determine who will replace Scalia.

But President Obama, true to form, is not letting tradition – or Republicans – stop him, and is poised to name someone just as radical as his previous appointments of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Except that this time, the precarious 5-to-4 balance of the high court – with Justice Anthony Kennedy the powerful swing vote – is at stake.

Another liberal justice will revolutionize America European-socialist-style on everything from private property rights to religious liberty to racial favoritism, and extending even to the nation’s ability to defend itself from terrorism.

It will be the biggest political war in our history. And it’s good thing it’s in an election year, because all the leading Republican candidates for president, despite their differences, have already made it clear they will hold GOP senators’ feet to the fire on resisting Obama, a level of pressure on these comfy members of Washington’s most exclusive club that would be impossible any other time.

War means Obama will very likely use what has been a dependable nuclear option for Democrats for many years: race. The nomination of D.C. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Obama look-alike who would be the first Indian-American high court justice, or another racially-charged nominee, would be a prelude to accusing Senate Republicans of opposing the choice because of skin color.

Against this, GOP senators must do what they have so often pathetically failed to do: fight for the principles they ran on and claim to believe.

They must be willing to answer the Democrats’ charges of racism with counter-charges that Obama and his party in Congress seek even more government power than they’ve already procured the past seven years – and if not opposed, will end America as we have known it.

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